January 21, 2011
Dr. Elizabeth Unger
Chief of Chronic Viral Diseases Branch
National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases
Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Dear Dr. Unger,
Congratulations on your appointment to your new position. I wish you great success. Your future performance in this position will have a huge effect on my future and the futures of millions of Americans and others around the planet.
The only way I could see your future performance as a success would be if you will take the Chronic and Viral Diseases Branch of the National Centers for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases in the direction of research into the viral cause(s) of the infectious neuroimmune disease called myalgic encephalomyelitis by the World Health Organization and trivialized by the CDC by calling it “chronic fatigue syndrome” for the last 20 years.
The NIH symbolically extended its middle finger into the faces of “CFS” patients when it moved “CFS” research to the Office of Women's Health, which has no labs, no recognition and no power to do anything positive about this disease. After 8 years of making recommendations to the Secretary of Health, virtually none of those recommendations have been acted upon and for many years, those suggestions have not even been acknowledged. This disease disables children, men and women.
You have it in your power to change the direction of “CFS” research, away from the marketing and public relations attempt to morph it into a form of mental illness – a direction it should never have been forced into by your predecessors. You can get this research, and the taxpayers' investment, back on target, or you can continue the bad faith pseudo-research of those who preceded you. This pseudo-research has benefited only the disability insurance industry - because it enables them to deny disability payments to patients - and the psychiatrists who have captured the field in lieu of any biomedical treatments being sanctioned by CDC.
From the time of the 1984 epidemic outbreak of this disease in Incline Village NV, where the attending physicians had brain scans showing punctate lesions similar to patients with that other infamous, retrovirally caused disease – HIV/AIDS - through the ensuing 27 years, researchers have continued to pile up the evidence that this is a disease caused by one or more viruses. Hundreds of physicians and their patients have noticed for decades that this illness has many of the same symptoms and signs of other viral diseases, such as influenza, chronic Epstein-Barr, and HIV/AIDS.
Yet the CDC called it “mass hysteria” in the 1980's. That was nonsense then and it's still nonsense.
Dr. Harvey Alter of NIH has said recently, if “CFS” is not caused by the retrovirus XMRV and/or related MLVs, it is still obviously a serious biomedical disease with a viral cause and we need to do the research to find out which virus(es) are responsible.
You, Dr. Unger, have the chance to stand on the shoulders of giants like Drs. Alter, Lo and Komaroff, or to sink back into the 19th Century's misogyny and misdiagnosis that views this disease as a mental illness. I fervently hope you will do right by American taxpayers, persons who have ME/CFS and those who care about them.
Sincerely,
Lilly Cooper – American citizen with ME/”CFS” for 29 years
********************************************************************************************
eunger@cdc.gov (Elizabeth Unger)bzb8@cdc.gov (Beth Bell)
txf2@cdc.gov (Tom Frieden)
kathleen.sebelius@hhs.gov
dennis.mangan@nih.gov
francis.collins@nih.gov
anthony.fauci@nih.gov
********************************************************************************************
eunger@cdc.gov (Elizabeth Unger)bzb8@cdc.gov (Beth Bell)
txf2@cdc.gov (Tom Frieden)
kathleen.sebelius@hhs.gov
dennis.mangan@nih.gov
francis.collins@nih.gov
anthony.fauci@nih.gov
